Monthly Archive for November, 2010

: November, 2010

Recently I wrote about how holiday parties can be a good way to keep your job search moving forward during the holidays. The winners of a Office Holiday Party Regrets essay contest had some interesting stories to tell and some embarrassing situations to deal with after their big events. While these stories make good reading, they are surely situations you want to avoid. …

Job search momentum gathers with the amount of effort you put in a search. Ask any job seeker who has had to re-start a search and they probably will tell you it was tough to start where they had left off. Most likely their advice would be: Don’t stop. Once your search is under way, it tends to build a source of energy that helps keep you confident. You want to keep that going, but people often stop their job search during the holidays because they think” nobody is hiring.” This simply isn’t true. …

“Having a good attitude goes a long way in a job search,” a hiring decision-maker recently told me. We were talking about what makes a job candidate stand out from the crowd. In a close race between two job candidates, a gracious attitude does make a difference. …

Job search engine Simply Hired.com expects the U.S. economy to add between 550,000-600,000 jobs during the holidays — up from 2009, when retailers added only 500,000 jobs, but down from 2008 when more than 720,000 jobs were added. …

Mindful that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have much higher unemployment rates than the general populace, Microsoft recently launched WeStillServe.com, a site that connects ex-service men and women to veterans who already work for the company. These Microsoft insiders can help match candidates to job opportunities within the company. …

Unless Congress says otherwise, on November 30 the states will begin to cease paying the extended unemployment benefits that enable millions of Americans to collect support checks for up to 99 weeks as opposed to the standard 26 weeks. …

The HIREvent job fair will be held from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday at the Hotel Whitcomb, 1231 Market Street in San Francisco. Several Bay-Area employers will be actively hiring in fields ranging from accounting, sales, education and hospitality to food service, administration, customer service, finance and more. …

The liberal Employment Policy Institute posted an extract from its forthcoming, “State of Working America” report, to illustrate the concentration of income growth for top wage earners. EPI calculates that between 1979 and 2005, households at the bottom fifth of the income scale have seen an average, inflation-adjusted income growth of just $200. That is not an average annual increase of $200, but rather, an increase of $200 over 26 years. By contrast, a small number of households at the top 0.1% of the income scale saw average income growth of almost $6 million over that same period. …